Record-breaking Nine-Hour Rainbow Appears in Taiwan

A professor in Taiwan claims to have witnessed the longest ever visible rainbow, clocking in at nearly nine hours, and plans to submit it for a world record.

The rainbow lasted for eight hours and 58 minutes in the mountains around the Taiwanese capital of Taipei, according to Chou Kun-hsuan, a professor at the Chinese Culture University.

Chou, along with colleague Liu Ching-huang, scrambled to document the rainbow that appeared on 30 November, mustering students to photograph the arc from every angle. The professors were originally monitoring the rainbow to test a theory that the bands of light descend as time passes.

“It was amazing … It felt like a gift from the sky … It’s so rare,” Chou told the BBC. “When we broke the previous record after passing six hours, I was hardly able to stay seated for lunch.

“I was so excited.”

The professors observed four separate rainbows during the nine-hour period, at one time photographing all in a single frame. The previous day a rainbow near the campus appeared for six hours.